> Started consistently covering 50 new words a day on Anki
For anyone here who has used anki, that's a huge number. This person is really dedicating their time at this point, because 50 new cards/day very quickly snowballs and you're doing 300+ reviews daily.
I did 20 reviews/day for ~6 months straight for Korean, and that took me 30-60 minutes, every day. Thinking about 50/day sounds utterly exhausting.
It's a good thing a french 5k deck exists also, as they saved a lot of time on not having to make cards manually. On average a word entry takes ~1-2 minutes (I have to query 3 dictionaries), so that comes down to only ~45 words per hour...
---
> I firmly believe that learning languages in school, especially in the United States, is generally extremely inefficient.
This, so much this. Classes provide rigidity but having a tutor + finding people to talk with helps you out significantly more. I went to a language exchange that wasn't bad* where I was able to speak for 1 hour with 1 korean person, a teacher, who would point out my mistakes and write down words when I had to dip into English. My conversational ability improved dramatically after doing that for ~1 month.
* Most language exchanges are shit. Because they're unstructured. People randomly filter in/out and a lot of people are shy or aren't sure what to do. It often devolves into a) "Any korean questions??" or just general conversation. Great for making friends, terrible for seriously practicing Korean.
---
> As much as Duolingo likes to tell you this, 5 minutes a day of fumbling around with the mobile app isn’t going to make you fluent.
I get why duolingo does this. At the same time, I hate them for advertising themselves as "the world's best way to learn ". Not only is this not true, their Japanese and Korean courses were (still are?) notoriously terrible compared to their Spanish and French courses. Not that a language can be learned from 1 resource, anyways.
---
> On the other hand, since I spent so many hours just casually talking with people, I got pretty good at having generic conversations.
This is where I got after ~12-15 months as well. I can quite easily converse about basic things like me, my hobbies, work, etc for hours but as soon as the conversation delves into a niche like politics or just more advanced discussion, I falter pretty hard. Also describing things beyond a basic level is rough: "I like this, that" vs "The mood of the film was twisted but exhilarating".
---
What I find interesting here is how far one can progress in only 12 months with a language like Spanish or French (with a mother tongue of English). For Korean, I wasn't even remotely close to understanding things like news articles at 12 months of study. I'm still not, because that vocabulary is quite advanced and not really used in regular conversations that much.
The simple truth for learning a language is as the author here mentioned: consistent and diligent studying, with humility. There is no shortcut, no one app that does it all. You just have to study, and be able to honestly evaluate yourself and your mistakes. (Recording yourself speaking the language greatly helps here).